By Morgan Deane:
Now that we are at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, it is a good time to take stock and assess his actions. Unfortunately, this can be difficult to do because most of the discussion can’t rise above partisan talking points, with each side selectively promoting or dismissing their party’s achievements in the news or social media.
The perspective of a historian can rise above partisan squabbles. Historians use various methods for judging a presidency, but many of these methods also suffer from flaws such as the historian’s ideological position, the politician’s success in reelection, or on vague measurements such as the mood of the country. My favorite method judges a president’s success mostly on the activities and accomplishments of the first six months or two years of the term (depending on who you ask), with late second term scandals mattering the least. With that time frame in mind, we can safely look at health care, the stimulus, and Iraq.
As far as health care is concerned, there is a good deal of debate over the efficacy of the law sponsored by Obama that also follows partisan lines. One way around this is to look at the campaigns of the politicians and the resulting votes. Regardless of the salesman skills of politicians, Americans have a keen sense for seeing through that rhetoric to punish politicians for policies that aren’t working. As a result, the key for gauging the success of the health care bill is that very few people actively ran on it after it was passed!
In 2010 and 2012, many key architects of the bill declined to run for reelection at all, at least in part because of the uphill climb that resulted from being somebody that supported Obamacare. In the 2012 election cycle here in Nevada, there were only a handful of people that even mentioned the bill, but those were Republicans vowing to repeal it. Their platform of changing the bill contributed to their winning the most seats since the Civil War. In 2016, Hillary Clinton did run on the bill, by offering profuse promises to fix it, even though she was known for her health care bill 20 years earlier and was a member of Obama’s cabinet. In summary, the bill was such a success that when politicians had to put their jobs on the line and the votes were counted, they often failed miserably.
The stimulus bill faced its own hard realities. Like the health care bill, most judgments about its success or failure are based on the politics of the person arguing. Even after the bill was passed, the economic health of the country seemed so frail for so long that the few who defended the bill only offered a tepid argument about how much worse it could have been. As politicians ran for office, they avoided offering new stimulus bills, and instead called for investments or tax breaks.
On Iraq, Barack Obama made a number of key decisions during the first two years of his administration, and the pullout of troops happened just outside of the time frame we are analyzing. Seized documents from terrorists showed that the fighters in Iraq declined reinforcements around 2010. They said that the war was lost, and that any further recruits would needlessly die. Also in 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq the Obama administration’s greatest successes. The primary sources from both victor and vanquished acknowledged the reality that the war was won. The remaining task required a residual force for training, and to provide a much needed honest broker between the Shia majority and the Sunni and Kurd minorities.
But Obama failed to capitalize on that success. He pulled out the remaining soldiers in late 2011 after failing to sign a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government. The resulting power vacuum, politicization of the army by Shias, and the withdrawal of Sunnis from many key positions, allowed ISIS to secure key territory. Obama’s entire second term has come and gone and ISIS still has much of that territory. As many warned at the time of the precipitous withdrawal, American forces had to reenter the country, but did so in a worse strategic position than before, and with American credibility and influence in the region at its nadir.
Defenders of the administration’s decision argued that they didn’t get the proper guarantees from the Iraqi government. But the 10,000 or so troops offered by President Obama in negotiations was so paltry that the Iraqi government didn’t see them as worth it. The new government would have taken a great deal of political damage in being seen as American puppets, but those damages would have been offset with the benefits from the 20,000 or more soldiers that American generals suggested.
In short, Obama set up a situation where an agreement was unlikely to occur, and then hid behind supposed Iraqi intransigence. Because the public was already sick of war, and thought President Bush made the original mistake by invading, it was Bush that received most of the blame for the resulting chaos, despite the fact that it was Obama who squandered the victory.
Just like the health care law and stimulus bill, the use of combat troops was politically dead after Obama’s decisions. Out of the 16 Republican nominees for President in 2016, only one of them proposed committing ground troops against ISIS, and he polled so low that he was merely an asterisk over the course of his short campaign. Several ran on a vigorous air campaign in Syria; they also received little support. Instead, the traditional party of a strong and active foreign policy turned to the most isolationist candidate since Taft.
The political realities of the stimulus, Obamacare, and the commitment of American soldiers in the Middle East point to their failure. Unlike the New Deal, which continues to inspire calls for a New New Deal, or the military buildup of Reagan that inspires Republican calls for a stronger military, there is no political will or call for a repeat of the key policy decisions of President Obama’s early years. These ideas are ruinous for their defenders and a boon to those promising to oppose them. All of these factors mean that Obama’s two year verdict will make him go down in history as a failure as a president.
Morgan Deane is an OpsLens Contributor and a former U.S. Marine Corps infantry rifleman. Deane also served in the National Guard as an Intelligence Analyst.
